1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a fingerprint recognition apparatus for distinguishing forged fingerprint and a method thereof, and more particularly, to a forged fingerprint distinguishing apparatus for distinguishing forged fingerprint such as the one on paper or film from a human biological fingerprint and a method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Biometric information has been widely used for user authentication of the information device for its unchangeable features and uniqueness, and specifically, fingerprint recognition has gained growing attention and popularity than the other schemes due to its simpler structure and yet superior performance.
Generally, a user authentication is used in the fields that require high security such as access control, e-business, financial transaction, or securing documents or files on personal computer (PC) or confidential data of the company. Therefore, it is most important that the user authentication distinguishes artificially forged fingerprint (‘forged fingerprint’) from authentic human fingerprint efficiently.
One of the ways to forge fingerprint is to apply or coat transparent liquid such as water or oil on a paper sheet or a film printed with a fingerprint thereon, and bring this into a contact with a fingerprint recognition device. Most of the conventional fingerprint recognition devices perceive such forged fingerprints and so process authentication.
FIGS. 1A and 1B show fingerprint images acquired through a conventional fingerprint recognition device, in which FIG. 1A is acquired from the authentic fingerprint and FIG. 1B is acquired from the forged fingerprint described above. FIGS. 1A and 1B are similar to each other.
One could put the above forged fingerprint on his fingertip, and in this case, the forged fingerprint can hardly be distinguished by the known fingerprint distinguishing technologies such as temperature detection, pulse detection, pressure detection, blood flood detection, or sweat gland detection.